Over & over & over I tell you how much I love quotations. And here is a quotation that in part explains my love of quotations: “A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who posses it. One must learn from him who knows.”
A quotation cannot help you learn what you don’t already half know, but a quotation can help you articulate to yourself & to others what you half know but cannot quite explain -- either to yourself or to others.
For instance. I know there is something slightly wrong with the emphasis, in early education, on computer knowledge. Many people in education seem to think that computers can teach a child everything & the sooner we start children on computers the better -- and children seem to love computers, they take to computers like fish take to water.
“It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the absolute knowledge of computer science while they are unable to read for reading demands making judgments at every line.”
That’s it! It is too easy to use computers & it teaches the wrong skills. Computers contain absolute knowledge: there are clear cut right & wrong answers. Hit the wrong key & it’s a mess; hit the right key & you are home free. How wonderful, how precise. But life isn’t like that. Life is full of fuzzy questions, fuzzy answers: you must constantly make judgments, difficult judgments, imprecise judgments. There are no clear cut right & wrong answers in real life. Children love computers, and they should be taught to use computers, but real education involves much more than a computer can ever teach them.
And again, a quotation explains to me, and to others, what we must teach children. “Truth has only one face, that of a violent contradiction.” This is a hard quotation to understand but it really does some up a great deal. In truth, life is full of good & evil, and almost always the good & evil are mixed in together. Parenthood is good, wonderful & burdensome, difficult. We love our parents, and at times we hate what they have done to us. Killing someone is wrong, but then is it right for us to kill them to stop them from killing. “Truth has only one face, that of a violent contradiction.”
I could go on & on with quotations that have made my own thoughts clearer to me. I read books of quotations because “A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who posses it. One must learn from him who knows.”
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein